Ma Yuan, who served the court of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) in Hangzhou, was one of the first artists to realize the expressive potential of the album format. Most of his extant works have only survived as individual leaves, like this one. Yet the few known complete albums reveal Ma Yuan’s remarkable sensitivity to pacing and structure and his ability to tell a story through a series of linked scenes on the same theme. This leaf almost certainly belonged originally to such an album, in which the white-robed character, our protagonist, would have appeared in each leaf.